Fairvote Canada has already analyzed the Canadian election of May 2. Here is the proportion of the national popular vote won by each of Canada’s five leading parties: Conservative 40%, New Democratic 31%, Liberal 19%, Bloc Quebecois 6%, Green 4%.
By contrast, here is the percentage of seats won in Parliament by each of those parties: Conservatives 54%, New Democratic 33%, Liberal 11%, Bloc Quebecois 1%, Greens less than 1%. Thus the Conservative Party has an absolute majority in Parliament even though fewer than 40% of the voters voted for that party.
One hopes the British voters notice these results. British voters will vote in two days on whether to switch from “first past the post” to Instant Runoff Voting. One could wish the British were given a chance to vote on Proportional Representation, but even a vote for IRV will signal dissatisfaction with the existing system. Of course, the United States also uses “first past the post” for all its federal elections. Thanks to Thomas Jones for this news.
Fair Vote Canada’s press release is here:
http://www.fairvote.ca/en/Canadians-cheated-again-by-voting-system
They point out:
“At the time of writing, these were the actual seats won and leading for each party:
CON 167, NDP 102, LIB 34, BQ 4, GREEN 1
If the seats were won in proportion to the votes that were cast, the numbers would look like this:
CON 122, NDP 95, LIB 59, BQ 19, GREEN 13”
Quite a difference.
In the 2007 Australian elections, where they have used IRV for nearly a century, the Labor party got 43% of the vote and 55% of the seats.
Hardly any better than Canada’s “terrible” first-past-the-post system this year.
IRV and FPTP have nearly identical disproportionality problems in their worst-case examples, and those worst-case examples happen with about the same frequency.
So yes, I hope the British are listening. A vote for IRV/AV is not a vote for PR, and changing the system without providing any change in results will only further-sour voters who are already sick of listening to the lie-filled (on both sides) debate.
IRV/AV isn’t EVEN a half-measure. If you want PR, don’t vote for anything that isn’t PR.
Simple P.R.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner
— via pre-election candidate rank order lists – to move excess winner votes down and loser votes up.
ALL voters elect somebody – directly or indirectly.
——–
The incumbent gerrymander MONSTERS (and EVERYBODY connected with creating the gerrymanders) are the ENEMIES of the People — way beyond being party hack robots. Think the Stalin/Hitler concentration camps.
But the difference, Dale, is that whereas in Australia, other left parties (The Greens won over 7% of the popular vote) contributed to the Labor victory, in Canada, nearly every non-Conservative party leans left. You could of course argue that some moderates who voted Liberal would have chosen the Conservatives second, but without IRV, we will never know – which is of course the argument for IRV.
IRV does not strive to achieve proportional representation; it privileges majority over plurality support. To not understand this is to be a poor critic of IRV.
The Brits did discuss P.R. quite a bit regarding the Alt.V. (IRV) bill.
The brain dead U.K. LibDems face a wipeout like the Libs in Canada with or without IRV in the U.K.
— i.e. the MORON LibDem leaders made a deal with Cons Devil instead of joining forces with all the other parties to simply pass a P.R. bill into law and order a new P.R. election.
If Alt.V. is defeated, then expect a crisis in the U.K. regime — i.e. LibDems may end the deal with the Cons.
http://www.elections.ca/ele/41ge/enr/EventResults.txt
http://enr.elections.ca/National_e.aspx
shows both party votes and party seats – UNLIKE the moron media in the U.S.A.
as a closet fascist, it is unlikely that one such as Harper would do anything that was not top down. a grassroots movement is what is needed to unseat and shift the system towards equanimity. since Harper is also a frothing at the mouth capitalist, the best way to encourage a shift,is to hit him where it hurts. IN HIS WALLET. a good healthy tax revolt, with participants(hopefully lots of Harper detractors) kittying their annual taxes for the legal defence of the early legal victims. the number victimized would decline over time until the Conservative Government was on its knees and open to negotiation with the 75% of Canadians who did not elect him.
There is a lot of playing both sides here. While complaining that the Conservatives won a majority of seats without a majority of votes, the win by Green Candidate Mays is being trumpeted. She won with 48% of the votes, which means that the majority of voters in her district voted against her. If it is bad for the Conservatives, why aren’t you complaining about HER win, as well?
It is amazing that there is no proportionate representation in English speaking countries anywhere but all claim to be Democratic and none is, because Democracy means the application of the will of the people.
A conclusion must surely be that they do not know this or non-conservatives are just more ignorant, or don’t care, possibly have not learned to add up two and two, cannot read, do not have or produce the type of leadership the conservatives have or are prepared to accept the status quo, I am not Canadian but I am puzzled but truly wish you good luck. john konings.
# 9 New Zealand and Ireland have P.R. systems about 90 plus percent accurate.
Australian Senate has P.R. by States.
U.K., Canada, U.S.A. — in the EVIL gerrymander STONE AGE — just the way the EVIL party hacks love it.
@8 What’s your complaint? That somebody won a single seat on a plurality? Maybe multi-member districts would satisfy, but May would still have been elected.
This seems to be a different problem than a disproportionately high return on seats in a national vote.
@4, Erik
Oh, don’t worry, I have plenty of other reasons to criticize IRV (click my name); that it is not-at-all proportional is simply the lone criticism relevant to it’s unnecessary insertion into this story.
Did Fairvote Canada do an analysis for the results outside of Quebec?
Or what the potential results would like under IRV.
So far all they appear to have done is cut and paste the results from Elections Canada and perhaps add some commentary.
Or for that matter won’t the British take notice that Canada now has a majority government and won’t depend on the deference of the opposing parties.
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On the topic of the AV (IRV) vote in the UK, I’ve been campaigning for a yes vote, and I have to say its going to be quite close. The campaign from the higher ups has been all slander, and a lot of people just don’t care anymore its distracted away from the issue.
I will not be surprised with a 50-60% no vote come tomorrow, but hope for the best. If we can’t get it here, I doubt it’ll pop up in Canada either anytime soon.
Here’s a world-historical super-genius saying FPTP is the only way to go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0pZ9LTZW1g
Not that I agree.
Hi Dale. I read much of your article, and you may well be correct that PR is the best of the three systems.
I also think that IRV can change election results gradually as consciousness changes. In the US, where I live, there may be millions of voters who don’t even understand that it’s possible to vote for a “third party.” And thus, although IRV might change results by 1-3% in particular elections, over time, party representations, platforms and positions would change considerably.
In the US, third-party candidates are marginalized and excluded from debates. There are many reasons for this, but IRV could ameliorate.
Consider, also, all of the rightists who view lack of runoff voting as a defense of Pinochet’s coup and subsequent murder of thousands. Insofar as IRV could obviate such arguments, it would have value.
If the U.S. House of Representatives were elected proportionally, what would the breakdown be after the 2010 election?
Hi Arthur. I don’t know how we’d be able to tell. As people voted (largely pragmatically), the Republicans got 51.6% and the Dems got 44.8%. Our House has zero representatives from other parties. The Green Party and the Libertarian Party are our largest “third parties.” Republicans comprise 55.4% of our Representatives, and Democrats 44.6%.
As you might know, our Senate has the potential to have wildly disproportional representation. Each state has 2 Senators, regardless of its population (Calif has a population of 37 million; Wyoming has a pop. of .5 million, but each have 2 senators).
For advocates of PR, the Canadian result is just more damning evidence that FPTP is undemocratic. But this is not the kind of evidence that puts electoral reform on the public agenda. In fact, it is actually evidence that FPTP does exactly what it is supposed to do, which is to (artificially) create a majority in the legislature for the largest party. In order to get electoral reform on the agenda, FPTP has to produce results that are anomalous from the point of view of its defenders, especially wrong-winner elections. That has happened in Canadian provinces (hence the near adoption of STV in British Columbia), but I don’t recall that it has happened in Canadian federal elections.
For more on this, see Matt Shugart’s blog as well as the academic publications he cites there.
For any juveniles on this list —
Democracy = MAJORITY RULE, direct or indirect
monarchy/oligarchy = minority rule, direct or indirect
Canada 2011 – one more EVIL and VICIOUS monarchy/oligarchy regime in world history
— with the top Cons party hack robots claiming a 100 percent mandate from Hell to do whatever.
Is so-called civilization DOOMED by NOT having REAL Democracy in a whole lot of regimes ???
@ 21.
It would be difficult to predict how a proportional vote would work in the U.S. but surely some academic has done some work on this. Can anyone point to any such study.
For a very rough guess, if you look at the average size of a 2010 House district – about 750,000 eligible voters – then compare it to the 2010 party votes for Representatives – available in the December 2010 Ballot Access News – you’ll see that the Libertarian Party would’ve gotten one seat on a purely proportional reward. The Green Party and Constitution Party would have needed to triple their votes.
That’s no indication of how the votes would actually have played out under different systems. For example, if each state were multi-member constituency with a single transferable vote as in Ireland, how would that have worked? Is there any reason why a state could experiment with PR in a federal election?
Again, it would be interesting to see any academic speculation on the subject.
Obviously, that should be @19, not @21.
#22, if you look at each state’s Congressional delegation separately, the number of small party winners goes up slightly, even given current voting patterns. California, for example, would have sent a Libertarian to Congress in almost every election since approximately 1992. I think that the Natural Law Party would have had a representative for one term as well (I would have to look this up).
But this is misleading. There are few credible small party candidates for Congress in large part because there are so few small party candidates with experience in state legislatures. After a couple of election cycles of PR for state legislatures, small parties would start to win a few seats in Congress, even under FPTP at the federal level, because they would have developed a group of qualified candidates.
In turn, the key to getting elected to a state legislature (as a member of any party, regardless of size) is hands-on experience in local government. Small party activists can get elected to office — even under winner-take-all rules — if they are willing to start with the sewer board or the school board, then the city council, then county office, then the legislature. That’s how all but a handful of Republicans and Democrats do it.
Responding to the question, “is there any reason why a state could [not] experiment with PR in a federal election?”. Since the 1960’s, federal law requires all states to use single member districts. This law can be changed, but it would be politically very difficult. It’s a better strategy to put the effort into PR for one or more state legislatures.
Great comments, Scott and Bob. I lack answers to your questions, but I’d be skeptical about the value of any academic study that would examine how PR would work in the US per people’s existing politics.
In South Carolina, Alvin Greene garnered 28% of the votes, while his infinitely superior Green Party opponent got 9%. This signals that the two-party grip on consciousness is terrifying. We need to democratize processes and consciousness every way we can, and runoff voting (PR would be impossible in a country so Constitution-obsessed that it continues to exclude DC residents from representation) is a necessary first step – although probably an inadequate one.
P.R. — see the multi-party results in recent elections in
Germany
Ireland
New Zealand
Israel
some SANE regimes — unlike the INSANE minority rule gerrymander regimes in the U.S.A, U.K, Canada, etc.
P.R. and App.V.
Canada prelim results — 308 gerrymander districts
145 robots got over 50 percent in THEIR gerrymander districts.
163 robots got less than 50 percent.
lowest robot — about 31 percent — a mighty plurality victory of the ages.
Demo Rep, are you sure that Governments sporting parties that call for the extermination of certain ethnic groups as a “sane” regime?
@ 25 If you’re going to debate the topic, you’re going to need to see all the arguments and the analysis of some likely scenarios. If academics aren’t doing it, then maybe some think tanks are. Either way, I’d like to see some work on PR in the US.
Alvin Greene’s large vote was in part a result of a straight-ticket vote. I’ve looked at the numbers and about 90% of his votes were straight-ticket Democratic Party voters. I’m not sure PR would preclude this.
#28 “Demo Rep, are you sure that Governments sporting parties that call for the extermination of certain ethnic groups as a “sane” regime?”
Such parties are against the law in any EU country. And, looking at past history, neither(as prominent examples) the NSDAP nor any Communist Party ever ran for public office espousing a program of genocide or any other form of mass murder. Please note that all of Hitler and Stalin’s programs of mass killings were presented to the public as something else(e.g., resettlement, “crop failures”) and enveloped in state secrecy.
@29 We can agree that if academic work exists, it would be foolish to ignore it.
But one doesn’t “need” these studies in order to argue for IRV or PR if one believes that these two systems are categorically more democratic – as processes – than FPTP.
This is another way of saying that democracy is a process and not an outcome.
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I was thinking that instead of straight national percentage, keep the same number of seats per province, and divide the seats up in each province by percentage of vote. This still allows for some regional preferences to carry over into the commons, which I consider acceptable.
Notes: 1) Party must gain enough support in the province for 1 full seat before consideration for remaining steps. 2) Round up or down as required. 3) A left over seat after rounding is awarded to the top party 4) Extra seats after rounding are subtracted from the lowest party’s seat which does not reduce that party’s seat total to zero. 5) Territories remain FPTP.
This system last election would result in CON 128 NDP 94 LIB 59 BLQ 18 GRN 9.